


Sinners Come Down

by aster_risk



Series: Sinners [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Consensual Infidelity, F/M, barns courtney (sorry I steal your lyrics for my titles), which ain't my cup of tea typically but here we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-19 01:23:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14863985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: Six years into her marriage to Daniel, Scully meets Fox Mulder at a bar one night, and they get talking and fucking over alcohol and self-pity.





	Sinners Come Down

Daniel Waterson was the first man who made her orgasm. That was love, she’d thought, when a man pushed his head between her thighs and devoted to her pleasure fifteen minutes of his undivided attention. Fifteen minutes reserved for her and only her, when he gave before he took. That was how she knew (or thought she knew) he wasn’t a fluke, that he loved her even if he went home to his wife every evening. In hindsight it was probably his experience—and his medical background—ticking the boxes of female pleasure. She might have known, but she’d wasted away her youth in the backs of baby blue Volkswagons pumping green-haired boys with tongue piercings until they groaned. She’d given her adolescent lovers sixty seconds of her dainty lips and then a quick yank of a hand job to finish the deed. Their cum was poison to her throat, their diets a fucking disaster. **  
**

Daniel was champagne by comparison. He read health magazines and made a steady income and could match her wits in conversation. He was still a fucking disaster, but at least the charming B-movie kind. At least he was perfect in theory.

So when he turned up at her front door in the pouring rain with the gaudiest engagement ring to ever cross her eyes, she choked ‘ _a thousand times yes_ ’ and buried her fingers in his hair. She clung to him like his body would dissolve into mist. _I left my wife_ , he’d breathed, wiping fat raindrops from his cheeks,  _I left her for you. I love you. Marry me, Dana._  He knelt before her, the ground wetting his kneecaps through his khaki pants. He did irreparable damage to his loafers, wading sidewalk puddles to reach her porch.

It was the most romantic fucking thing she’d ever seen. She can tell herself in hindsight that she married him out of some twisted sense of obligation—he left everything for you, Dana—and she wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but the truth is Daniel Waterson floored her. He charmed her, checked every box of a Hollywood drama suitor, complete with a drenched thunderstorm proposal and passionate kiss.

Then, of course, the credits roll. The audience files out the theater doors, and not one person considers the monotonous droll of married life upon which their heroic couple will embark.

Seven years post-credits, she guzzles her beer like the fountain of youth and slaps the empty bottle on the counter.  _Obligation_ , she tells herself as if it’ll fix her marriage,  _I stayed with him out of obligation_. Of course, obligation covers neither the thoughtless, fucked-up, manipulation that goes into staging the kind of proposal that Daniel offered her, nor the thoughtless, fucked-up rapture with which she had melted into his arms.

Obligation may not cover the truth, but it certainly covers the smack of tinted glass on a bar counter and the hefty tab she’ll rack up tonight. What’s the truth worth now, anyway? Too late to make twenty-five year old Dana say  _no_.

(And the worst part is, she doesn’t want to make that girl say no. She still loves Daniel, still holds dear to her chest the image of his tousled hair and bleary morning eyes every Saturday they slept in. She still savors the feeling of his calloused hands on her breasts and the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles. She loves him, she really does; she just kind of hates everything else about her life, and she can reasonably hold him responsible for most of it.)

She used to think the truth would absolve her of something. When she first started to resent the ins and outs of their marriage, his restrictive side and some of his more backward preconceptions about married women, she thought the cold truth would strip her of her feelings for Daniel. The truth was a bare wall, layers of paint peeled carefully away. What bullshit.

“Is this seat taken?” A kindly voice interrupts her spiral of self-pity.

“Nope.” She pops her ‘p’ and slumps back against the counter, sizing up the stranger who has plopped down beside her. He’s attractive—very attractive—in a scatterbrained kind of way. He smiles at her with the eyes of a golden retriever and a plump lower lip, the tilt of his nose only adding to the effect. He picks open a sunflower seed from a bag in his pocket and cracks open the shell, never breaking eye contact. Her blatant stare-down doesn’t seem to bother him at all; in fact, he only tilts his head and makes himself comfortable in her presence, flagging down the bartender for a beer.

He’s clearly had as rough a day as she has, maybe rougher. He unbuttons his suit at the collar, jacket already slung over his shoulder and tie dangling limply around the back of his neck. His sleeves are rolled up to the elbows, revealing muscular arms, tapering hands, and a Rolex that belies his rumpled features.

“What’s your name?” she asks, not caring that it sounds like a demand.

He finally breaks her gaze to shove the bag of sunflower seeds back into his pocket, and when he looks up at her, his smile has turned to a leprechaun-ish smirk. No, it doesn’t send a tingle of arousal to her sex; absolutely not.

“I’m Mulder,” he says brazenly, as if daring her to question the name.

She does. (Question it, that is. What kind of man introduces himself with just a surname? Not that she’d know, of course. She’s been married for seven years.) “Do you have a first name, or is that it?”

He chuckles. “I don’t use it.”

“Well, what is it?” She  _is_  demanding now, because this stranger chased away her boredom quicker than anyone had in a decade.  

“Tit for tat,” he counters. “What’s your name?”

She considers just saying Dana. She really does. But she hears it in Daniel’s voice, and she refuses to hear Mulder say her name like that. No reason for it. She just can’t.

“Scully,” she tells him. Her family surname, the one thing she had refused to give up when she married Daniel. Marriage is compromise, she’d heard a dozen times from her mother, but on this she had been absolutely uncompromising.

He mirrors her raised eyebrow. “Just Scully?” He clicks is tongue disapprovingly. “Well, if you must know, my first name is Fox, but I don’t think I could live with myself if I let you call me that.”

“Well, my full name is Dr. Dana Scully, but people seem to forget the first part.”

“Doctor Scully, hmm?” He takes a sip of his beer. “Well, Doctor Scully, it’s a pleasure to be on a last name basis with you.”

Mulder raises his beer in a toast, and she clinks her empty bottle to it. “To drowning our sorrows,” she replies.

A grimace crosses Mulder’s face, and for a moment she worries she’s said something wrong. Not that it matters, really. “Is it that obvious?” he mumbles.

“Only to someone in the same boat as you.” A bitter laugh escapes her lips.  “Misery can smell company a mile away.”

God, when did she become so jaded? Jaded was a classification reserved for divorced New York socialites piss-drunk on champagne, or middle-aged men embittered by the baby-faced med school graduate who out-gunned them for a job. Jaded attracted her to Daniel in the first place, enticing the sheltered second daughter of a Navy captain. But it wasn’t supposed to happen to her.

Cynicism mistaken for wisdom, that’s what it is. That what she is.

“So Mulder,” she begins authoritatively, “what’s your story? Why are you wallowing in a beer bottle on a Wednesday night?”

What a reprieve it would be to pity anybody else’s mistakes.

Mulder shrugs morosely. “Met a girl, got fucked, got married, got fucked over, got divorced, met her again, got fucked again, got fucked over again, and learned that she was only ever out to wreck me from the get-go. Just my luck, huh?”

“Wow, all in one day?” She chortles half-drunk at her own wit.

“If only.” Mulder leaned back against the bar. “Now it’s your turn, Doctor Scully. Why so sullen?”

She lets out a whoosh of breath and considers clamping up. Maybe if she were a hundred percent sober, she’d have frozen the conversation after learning his name, but it’s too late now. She doesn’t regret the personal shift in the air. Her marital troubles are none of his business, but that’s the point. Who better than a stranger to shoulder her troubles? After tonight, she’ll never see Mulder again.

“Well, my husband wants me to have kids, and I don’t want to. Not yet, at least.”

The silence sits between them like an anchor. Finally, Mulder breathes out a sigh. “That’s a big hurdle to jump.”

“I’m not sure if I want to jump it. Frankly, our needs and worldviews have become incompatible.”

“What do you mean he wants  _you_  to have kids?”

She huffs. “Daniel’s work takes him to out of state conferences, and he has, shall we say, old-fashioned opinions about who should bear the brunt of the childcare. Were we to have children, he would expect me to quit my job. That’s what I mean by incompatible. I want to work after I have kids, which ideally won’t be for a few years anyway. I have all respect for stay-at-home mothers, but I shouldn’t have to be one simply because I’m a woman. Not to mention I don’t think I want him to be the father of my children to begin with, which is entirely its own problem. Marriage is compromise, but sometimes it feels like I’m the only one expected to make those compromises. ” She finished in a rush, her head falling into the crook of her elbow.

“Why the hell did he marry an ambitious medical student, if that’s what he thinks of women?” interrupts Mulder.

“It’s not so much his views on women as his views on marriage,” she clarifies. Not that it matters.

“Still.” Mulder sticks out his lower lip indignantly. “You deserve better.”

“You just met me.”

“It doesn’t take me too long to get to know a person. Profiling skills,” he says with the hint of a smile. “And you seem like a fundamentally good person. It’s none of my concern, but it seems like you want to leave him. Like you should leave him.”

“It’s not that simple.” It isn’t, and it is. “You know that.”

“Diana… the woman I mentioned earlier, she left me. I was devastated. When she made her grand re-entrance into my life, I thought it would get better, but it turns out she was working against me. She tried to sabotage my work; she betrayed me. She put me in immense danger.”

“Jesus,” Scully mutters. “What on Earth do you do for a living?”

Mulder finishes his beer. Half-heartedly, he flicks her the cap. “I work for the FBI. X Files division.”

“What are the X Files?”

She can sense his hesitation, the way he squares his shoulders and examines her through sharp hazel eyes. She flicks the beer cap back at him. Whatever it is, that look in his eyes, its fire dies quickly.

“You’ll think I’m crazy,” he says at last.

“Okay, tell me.”

“Do you believe in the existence of extra-terrestrials?”

That takes her by surprise. She didn’t peg Mulder as a conspiracy-nut. “Logically, I would have to say no,” she tells him, keeping a measured tone.

“See?” he smiles morosely. “You think I’m crazy.”

“So what?” Her opinion doesn’t cost him anything, in the long run. (Or maybe it does. Maybe this interaction will cost them everything. Maybe she’s not sober enough to care, or maybe she never cared to begin with.)

“You looked at me like I sprouted a tinfoil hat out my scalp and started blabbering nonsense.”

She snorts and arches an eyebrow. “I didn’t leave, did I? Look, Mulder, I’m a scientist. I don’t accept personal conviction as proof.”

“Oh really?” Mulder points to the cross around her neck. “What about God?”

“Whether or not God exists, my faith provides valuable moral guidelines. Space aliens, on the other hand, have no greater purpose unless you talk to a scientologist, and I don’t think you’re that crazy.”

“Got that right, Scully.” He grins crookedly. A blush creeps up her cheeks. She can remind herself that arousal is an inadvertent reaction, unintentional, but the way he says her name is laced with all sorts of intention. She likes it, likes hearing Mulder address her so casually by her surname. It’s punchy, strangely arousing, spilling over his lips in a caramel-smooth tenor. Fuck.

She dares to entertain—she could just fuck him. God, does she want to fuck him. Just once, for the history books. She can store a mental image of him naked in her sheets, smirking exactly as he is right now. He can be her Humphrey Bogart, brief and sordid and passionate (and inevitably doomed).

Hell, maybe it will be terrible, and she’ll recall another reason she loved Daniel so much. Maybe it’ll give her a reason to stay. (Does she want one?)

“Sorry if I offended you,” interjects Mulder. “With the whole God thing.” She can tell by his tone that he isn’t used to making such apologies. He’s probably learned to deal with a plethora of snide comments about his line of work.

“It’s fine. I’m fine,” she says a little too quickly.

“Are you, Scully?”

She is anything but fucking fine, but saying it aloud only makes it true. “You know what it is about God?” she starts. “God  _means_ something. All I want—I just want—I want to believe that our choices mean something. That our lives will lead us somewhere.”

“Well, Scully, I want to believe in aliens, but we can’t have everything we want. We can have some things. Like autonomy, and alcohol, and divorce; death,” he counts off, “taxes…”

Is there something wrong with her, that she finds his brutal honesty attractive? Cynicism disguised as wisdom. Guess it still does something for her after all.

She flicks his beer bottle cap back at him. It pings his cheek obnoxiously, and he turns to face her. His eyes shine like canned olives, biting and salty and wet. She misjudged him; Mulder isn’t quite jaded. He’s still searching for something, with a quivering flame that hasn’t yet given way to resignation.

“Mulder.”.

He watches her expectantly.

“Do you want to get out of here? With me?”

His eyes widen. “Are you asking me if I want to have sex?”

She wrinkles her nose. “Subtlety, thy name is not Mulder.”

“Technically, Scully, you are a married woman.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

“I’m serious, Scully.”

Scully sighs. “If that bothers you…” she trails off.

“Any other day, and it might. Scully,” he explains carefully, “I like this.” He gestures between them. “Boy, do I want it. But I don’t want to put you in a difficult position, and that’s exactly what infidelity will do. You know that. You understand, I don’t want to make life any harder for you than it is.”

She holds back a barking laugh and slams her bottle on the table. “If only,” she says, “if only you could wreck my marriage more than it is. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel so fucking guilty about leaving him. And I know—” she holds up her hand— “I know I shouldn’t feel this bad, but I want to believe I didn’t waste my life with a man who doesn’t give a damn what I think in the end, who may never have given a damn, even if we both thought he did.”

Mulder is silent.

Scully flips her hair out of her face and chuckles hoarsely. “I’m sorry. I… fuck, I have nothing to add. Thank you, Mulder.”

“For what?”

Her voice softens; she tilts her head to meet his searching eyes. “For listening to me.”

She feels his hand slip into hers, lacing their fingers together in a warm gesture that is absolutely not the average prelude to a one-night stand. His thumb brushes her knuckles, his grip loose and cautious. She tightens their interlocked fingers, and she sees the taut musculature in Mulder’s shoulders finally relax.

“Ask me about God and then hold me like this,” she drawls huskily, “are you sure you don’t want to sleep with me?”

“My come-ons are that obvious?”

Scully hums. “Your theories are bunk, yet somehow they make excellent foreplay.” She can smell cinnamon and craft beer on his breath, that’s how close his face is to hers. She rests her cheek in the crook of her elbow and stares him down.

“I just want to know,” Mulder insists, “that you won’t regret it in the morning, if we have sex. I don’t want you to wake up and realize you’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“Mulder, I know what terrible mistakes feel like. I’ve made plenty. If this is a mistake, I won’t regret it.” She leans forward and presses her forehead against his, clumsily, tipsily, their noses bumping each other in the orange bar light.

He grins. “Never thought theology would get you laid, huh?”

She laughs, and it feels so good to let her lips part in a genuine smile. “Daniel is at a conference tonight. Can we go to your place?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Mulder nods.

They pay their separate tabs and drive their separate cars to the address that Mulder scribbled on a beer-stained napkin. There’s something squicky about this kind of affair, the kind that pretends to be entirely physical. Another reason, a shittier reason not to have kids with Daniel: she would love them too much to betray him.

 _Yes_ , she thinks as she feeds the parking meter outside Mulder’s apartment,  _jaded is the perfect word._  She uses ‘jaded’ like a presidential pardon and doesn’t stop to consider how warped her judgement has become.

Mulder parks in the lot and waits for her outside the building entrance. He slips his arm around her waist only as she accomodates it and guides her to his apartment. He slips off her coat at the door, hanging it over his wrist and jiggling the key into his door with the other hand. She doesn’t say anything, not a  _hey_  not a  _thanks_ , while they’re outside. Mulder speaks only in actions, gentlemanly and far classier than their plans for the night. She is all too familiar with indulgences.

Mulder’s apartment is a pleasantly shabby bachelor pad, home to two sagging futons and a tank of tropical fish. Files labeled ‘X-something-or-other’ bury the coffee table, hanging open and spewing their mysterious details all over his carpet. They share the table with only an empty Coke can bent awkwardly like a tall man sleeping in a carseat. The door to his bedroom hangs open, but the kitchen is shockingly clear. The fish tank motor hums listlessly in the background.

Mulder sweeps two button-ups off the couches and kicks a couple of shoes to one corner. Then he gestures grandly to the place. “Welcome to my humble abode, Scully. ” There’s that grin again, the lopsided smile that melts her insides. Every time he looks at her, she feels like she’s been tazed, and she wonders if he can feel the same electric buzz between them. Lightning in a bottle, that’s what they are. Building pressure, waiting to explode.

She slips off her shoes and pads over to him, her stockinged feet swishing against the floor. Sans heels, she feels like a bird in his arms, bony and weightless. She reaches for his hand, and he pulls her into him, his chin settling on her head as he shuffles them backwards toward the bedroom door.

In the waiting, they build something tender. Fully clothed, their bodies fit together like a decidedly weird jigsaw. It is sweet and comforting and completely fucking innocent, and anyone who saw them would think they’d made love a thousand times but definitely weren’t about to fuck tonight. Go figure.

She rests her palms on his chest and gives him a gentle push. His pectorals flex through his Oxford shirt, and she thumbs them appreciatively. “Bedroom,” she murmurs, tilting her chin in search of Mulder’s lips.

“Bedroom,” he confirms. She backs him into the wall first, picking slowly at his buttons. On her tiptoes, she can finally reach his lips, and he bends to kiss her properly. One of his hands brushes the small of her back; the other winds through her hair, cradling her head as she deepens the kiss with a moan.

It is fireworks. It is an entirely new sensation, like biting into an exotic fruit—just going for it, sinking your teeth through the skin and letting the juice run down your chin, manners be damned. It is transgressive, and transgression has always enticed Scully more than she cares to admit. Daniel was a transgression, a professor who bought her fine wine and fucked her over a mahogany dining table. Mulder, though—kissing Mulder lights a match in her stomach. She risks more from this sin than he does, and the risk excites her.

She seeks him with her tongue, nipping at his bottom lip. She fumbles her way through his buttons as her lips travel downward, trailblazing down his neck, past the landmark of his Adam’s apple. They roll across the wall of his apartment and stumble through the bedroom door. Mulder’s knees bend at the matress, and they fall onto his rumpled sheets.

She flings his shirt to the floor, and buries her face in the crook of his neck as he works on her blouse. Deft fingers unclasp her cotton bra and slide her skirt down her hips. “Is this…” he gasps, “okay?”

She nods frantically. “Better,” and kicks off her skirt. Lying half on top of him, her elbows pinned next to his head, she feels a hand slip between her thighs, tracing lines up the inside of her leg. A little moan escapes her. “Keep going,” she whispers, and her teeth dig into her bottom lip.

When she squeezes her legs together over his fingers, her breath hitching and her muscles seizing, guilt catches her by surprise. She hasn’t been this wet for anyone—her husband included—in years. She hasn’t ached for anyone this intensely since she was a lovesick teenager trying to lose her virginity in her parents’ car.

They blaze like a campfire—sputtering exhaustedly until a single twig catches; then, the flames roar upward and lap six feet high. If they were subdued at first, they surged at the touch of lips. Now, they move frantically, maneuvering out of slacks and flinging belts across the room and clambering toward the pillows with sheets bunched in their fists.

Mulder fetches a condom from his nightstand and a bottle of lube. It’s been so long since she’s seen a condom, not since she started birth control and met Daniel. Not since undergrad, and part of her feels like this night is a lapse in time. Like the planets and their moons spun backwards, and she’s once again too young to give a shit. (Really, the planets are still on their axis, and she’s too old to give a shit, but she won’t realize until tomorrow.)

She kneels over his lap, her hair tucked safely over one shoulder. Mulder’s lips grace her clavicles before moving to her breasts, sucking at stiff nipples, rolling them in his teeth for a moment. He runs smooth kisses over her breasts once, twice, then needily drags his mouth down her stomach and dips to kiss her naval. She arches into his body, clasping his shoulders with white knuckles.

“Mhhhmmm,” Scully hums, “Mulder, fuck me.”

He fixes her with the sweetest gaze imaginable. “If you’re ready.”

She lowers her voice to a sultry demand. “Play me like a piano, Mulder, and if you do it right I will sing for fucking Zeus.” She smirks a bit. “ _He_  can’t judge me.”

“Are you always like this?” he asks. Wry. Acerbic. Jaded.

“No.” Yes. She doesn’t remember when it happened.

“Just for me?”

She lowers herself onto him, feeling the head of his cock brush her slick folds through the white lace of her underwear. Mulder groans. “Just for you.”

She slips of her panties and takes him inside of her inch by inch, reveling in the feeling of this stranger moving through her body. This stranger whom she let in, not the other way around. She pushes up on her knees and drops back onto his lap, and she can feel Mulder’s grip tighten on her hips. Her breasts and coiffed hair bounce with the movement, slowing her bucks and allowing Mulder to thrust his pelvis forward, into her.

A breathy “oh,” pops off her tongue. Oh, she thought it wouldn’t be as good as it is. Oh, she wasn’t sure she wanted a spectacular orgasm out of this, but here she is. Lackluster sex would be so much less complicated.

Still, she whispers, “faster,” and Mulder obliges. Still, she drags her nails down his bare back; still, she presses her forehead to his as he thrusts into her and squeezes his thighs with her knees.

“If I don’t stop I’m going to come, Scully.”

“Do it then.” It comes out like a dare. She watches him shudder and pull out, his body going stiff and a primal croon building low in his throat. She watches him with eyes like hot coals, as if memorizing his picture to sculpt it later. Once finished, he disposes of the condom with as much class as he can muster and sneaks back to the sheets.

“Now Scully,” he says mischievously. He shakes tousled, sweaty hair out of his eyes.

She arches an eyebrow from where she still kneels naked on his sheets. “Yes?”

“How about I help you finish up?”

Scully cocks her head. She could deny herself this orgasm as if it absolves her of the sex, but does she really want absolution at this point?

Her lip curls into a seductive half-smile. “That sounds like a nice idea.”

Mulder pushes her into the pillows and dips his head between her legs. His thumbs run up her sides, holding her gently in place as his tongue picks up where his cock left off. He presses his mouth to her clit, sucks the sensitive knob, then dips his tongue into her sex. If she was close before, she’s teetering now. She wonders if he can taste himself in her sex. 

Her body bows and flexes off the mattress as her orgasm builds, and Mulder’s hands swoop behind her to cup her ass before she lands again. She cries out (she tries not to). She clenches and opens for him like insect wings, and Mulder laps at her cum like no one’s ever done.

Her limbs flop uselessly on the sheets when she finally recovers from the high. Her body tingles, her forehead slick with sweat. Mulder collapses beside her with a shit-eating grin that she can’t help but return.

“Well,” he says, which seems to sum it up perfectly. Perhaps he can feel the chemical rush between them, the intimacy that sprung from nowhere. They made galaxies from a speck of dust, say the physicists. God in the form of unfettered energy.

Her smile fades. “Well.”

“I would describe what just happened, but I’m still trying to unscramble the alphabet. I can find you something to sleep in, though” he offers.

And then—and then—she looks at his charming features and sweet hazel eyes and sees herself. She sees her own jawline, her own bare shoulders, her own tentative offer to spend the night. And when she looks down at herself, she sees Daniel in his boxers, abdominals flexed and watch still clasped around his wrist.

 _You can sleep here if you want,_  she’d said that first night.

 _How kind of you. I’d love to stay._  She doesn’t know what he told his wife when he snuck out that morning like a cat burglar. It doesn’t matter. He lied, and he stayed, and that was the beginning of the end.

“Not tonight,” she tells Mulder firmly, as if she’ll ever see him again. She gets up from the bed and collects her panties and blouse off the floor. Picking herself up, piece by piece. “I can’t stay.”

Now he’s nervous. “You said that your husband was gone at—”

“It’s not about him,” she snaps as she tugs up her skirt, sans undergarments. She softens. “It is, but not about the infidelity thing.” She hates the word ‘infidelity,’ how it pretends she has anything to be loyal to. 

Mulder deflates visibly, but he faces her with an understanding expression.

“I have to go,” Scully continues, “I don’t want to put you in a position you might regret one day.”

Mulder’s mouth makes a tiny ‘o.’ “I see. Scully, honestly, you should just leave him.” He holds up his hands, palms out. “I’ve done the whole divorce thing; it isn’t that bad when you don’t have kids involved.”

He tries for cheeky, but Scully dresses too urgently to notice.

“I’m serious,” he adds after a few seconds.

Scully looks up. “It’s not that simple.” It is.

“It is if you let it be.”

She huffs. “I don’t know, Mulder. I don’t  _fucking_  know.” She runs her fingers through her hair and half-tucks her blouse.

“Scully!” Mulder calls as she steps out the bedroom door.

Lingering in the frame, she turns back for one last glimpse of Fox Mulder.

He lies against the pillows, naked as Florentian marble. “When you leave him, I’ll be waiting.”  _Well,_ how goddamned romantic. She sees Daniel on her doorstep, a Tiffany’s box tucked into his palm. She sees the desperation in his sea-glass eyes.

“No,” she tells Mulder firmly. “Live your life. One day, maybe our paths cross again. But whatever you do, don’t wait for me.”

She gathers her coat and purse and clicks the door behind her. The whir of Mulder’s fish tank dissipates into silence.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic gave me SO MUCH grief. I had to apologize for it in advance and then procrastinate it for a week, because it was insanely hard to sit down and finish for some reason. It’s a challenge to write Scully in character, while also writing who she would be in a completely different life. Title of the piece comes from “Sinners” by Barns Courtney and you should all go listen to it because it's an amazing song.


End file.
